How ‘The Crown’ Season 3 Will Tell Princess Margaret & Lord Snowdon’s Story

The hit Netflix series The Crown Season 3 will pick up in 1964, four years after the marriage of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was given the title of Lord Snowdon upon marriage. The upcoming season will cover the time period through the mid-seventies, which will be just enough time to see the marriage truly melt down, but it won’t quite reach their divorce, which was granted in 1978 after things got really ugly.

Elle is sharing some of the high and low points of the upcoming series of The Crown concerning the royal marriage of the sister of Queen Elizabeth. When fans left the series, Vanessa Kirby was playing Princess Margaret and Matthew Goode had the role of Armstrong-Jones. When the series picks up for Season 3 in 1964, Princess Margaret will be played by Helena Bonham Carter and Lord Snowdon will be played by Ben Daniels, adjusting the cast for the aging process.

Robert Lacey, the history consultant for The Crown, shared that Season 3 will show the breakdown of the relationship and marriage of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, even as they have two children, says Town & Country.

“And in season three, without giving anything away—it’s on the record, it’s history—we’ll see the breakup of this extraordinary marriage between Margaret and Snowdon. This season, you see how it starts, and what a strange character, a brilliant character Snowdon was.”

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The royal couple was said to have separated in 1976, which is thought to be the cut-off point for Season 3 of The Crown. Cheat Sheet says that the marriage even started off as rocky because the princess got engaged out of spite in reaction to hearing that her former fiance, Peter Townsend, was getting remarried.

“She accepted the society man’s proposal out of despair. She’s learned just a day earlier that Captain Townsend intended to marry a 19-year-old Belgian woman named Marie-Luce Jamagne.”

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Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones were the first royal couple to get married on television, but only one foreign royal attended because others disapproved of Margaret’s choice of a husband.

There were many stories of affairs on the part of the princess and Snowdon, says Cheat Sheet, and some were very high profile.

“For the princess’ part, it was said that she had relationships with Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Warren Beatty, Anita Pallenberg, and Dusty Springfield.”

The ultimate divorce of Princess Margaret and Armstrong-Jones was the first for a senior member of the royal family, and at the time it was quite scandalous. There was a backlash against the princess because it was government funds paying for her lavish and careless lifestyle, and she was called a “parasite” in the press.